Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: BitSight CEO Tom Turner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What level of penetration do you have? How many companies are you rating in this mode?

Tom Turner: We rate around 120,000 enterprises around the globe. Those ratings are consumed by about 1,200 global customers that use BitSight in one of our use cases around third-party risks. That’s looking at vendors in their supply chain, applicants to cyber-insurance and also being able to look at their own rating performance in the context of competition or key benchmark that they use.

Sramana Mitra: Who are your primary customers? Who’s paying you and for what?

Tom Turner: Majority of our customers are in the Fortune 10,000. 20% of the Fortune 500 use BitSight in their third-party risk and >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: BitSight CEO Tom Turner (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are you measuring?

Tom Turner: The measurements that we look at fall into four buckets, if you think about it in a somewhat non-technical way. The important thing is these are all outcomes. These are things that are happening; not things that might happen. We collect all of this information globally. The first bucket to think about that’s important for measuring cyber security performance and therefore associated risk is the volume, variety, and frequency of a company’s machine in its environment that has been compromised.

There’s a powerful relationship between the frequency and the duration that an organization might have compromised assets and likelihood of that >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: BitSight CEO Tom Turner (Part 1)

Cyber security risk is growing exponentially. How do you measure and benchmark such risk?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having your introduce yourself as well as BitSight to our audience.

Tom Turner: I’m the CEO of BitSight Technologies. BitSight is a cyber security ratings company. We take a big data analytics approach to measuring the outcomes that have happened to hundreds of thousands of companies around the world so we can understand their security and risk performance.

Our customers use that information to understand third parties that are important to their business. These are vendors and their supply chain. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 3)

Jeff Swearingen: From an entrepreneur’s perspective, there’s always opportunity. The technology market is so saturated with companies and yet the market is moving so quickly. A young and agile company with some domain expertise can spot an opportunity and a gap in the market. That’s what SecureLink did. We found a gap in the market. We were ahead of it. We filled it, and we own it. Nobody does third-party remote access better than SecureLink.

If anyone is looking for an opportunity, you should have some domain expertise. My co-founder and I came from a technology and software background. We knew the people, problems, and the processes. One of the things I mentioned to entrepreneurs is to stay in your gold mine. If you know something about life insurance and if you understand that industry, that is gold. The closer you stick to >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the competitive landscape around you? We do a lot of discussions in the cyber security space. Cyber security has always been one of the most active areas of innovation and entrepreneurship. There’s a tremendous number of vendors and tremendous amount of activity in every corner of the cyber security industry.

Could you help us understand the ecosystem around you? Who’s doing what and where exactly do you position yourself in that continuum?

Jeff Swearingen: I agree that there’s an awful lot of software companies doing an awful lot of different things. When it comes to privileged access for third-party remote support, you don’t need SecureLink. You can buy seven or eight >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 1)

Jeff provides a window into the remote access world through this interview, a world that is vastly more complex today than it used to be.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to SecureLink.

Jeff Swearingen: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of SecureLink.

Sramana Mitra: What does SecureLink do? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anne Bonaparte, CEO of Appthority (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the 30,000 foot level question. What do you see out there as emerging trends? What are some open problems that you see that if you were starting a company today, you would feel good about solving that problem?

Anne Bonaparte: The data explosion is exponential. We see some sophisticated cross-border cyber battles going on. There are some very big challenging issues that are going to take a lot of cooperation and partnership across public and private to solve. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anne Bonaparte, CEO of Appthority (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How does your system access all of the data that apps are capturing? What is doable in terms of scanning what the apps are doing on these devices that are being plugged into the enterprise?

Anne Bonaparte: We can pull the app inventory from EMM systems. In the cloud, we are doing this analysis that is both static as well as running them in a virtual sandbox. We have millions of apps in our database, so we can easily understand, “Could this app grab calendars?” If you’ve got a flashlight app that is pulling content in the calendar, that’s an indication that you might want to take a second look, because there’s no real reason for that except for malicious or very poor programming practices. >>>